Black tribal-style heart with two paw prints above a line of script reading we all need that person who can be true to you, on a lower leg near the ankle.

Tribal heart with paw prints on ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black tribal-style heart with two paw prints sits on the lower leg, with a two-line quotation in black script beneath it. The heart is built from bold, solid black shapes, while the script is finer and more lightly weighted. The skin is pale and the tattoo is shown against a plain wooden floor, with the photo taken straight on.

Blackwork Ankle Heart Paw print Quote Script Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dog is already waiting at the gate when you come out of Pellow's kitchen with the lamp unlit. Nobody in Hatherleigh Bottom owns her. She came out of the beeches in March with a snare wire biting into one foreleg, and she sat on your step until you fetched the bread knife. You cut the wire away while she held perfectly still, and that was the start of it, though you did not know yet that a debt can be paid in both directions.

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All through the spring she walks you to the edge of the wood and no further. Each morning her paw prints lead one way into the beech dark, and each evening they come back, dusty with leaf mould, pressed into the mud by the stile. Mrs Pellow says the wood keeps what it likes. You laugh at that until the day the prints do not return at dusk, and the gate stays shut all night with nobody on the other side of it.

At first light you take the lamp and go in alone, calling her name between the trunks. Past the holly you find an old man on a fallen log, a tin cup of cold tea beside him and a terrier asleep across his boots. He tips his cap and says she was never lost, only keeping an appointment with him, the way she does every spring. You ask who he is. He says he was the one who stayed true to her once, and that a dog can tell the difference between someone who stays and someone who only comes by.

You walk home with Sorrel trotting at your heel, the wire scar pale on her leg. At the gate she stops and looks back at the wood, then up at you, and you understand she has been choosing people for a long time. She waits for you to lift the latch before she goes through.